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Friday, August 16, 2013

wolves come in the form of pretentious parents

i'll bet little red riding hood never had to deal with mean girls. or their even meaner parents. tho' perhaps wolves come in all kinds of guises. i heard tales yesterday of the awfulness of girls in the seventh grade and the even awfulerness (that's a word i just made up) of their parents. happily, my child was not involved, but i was still shocked.

tales of snotty parents who wouldn't let their daughter play with another girl at her house because she and her family live in a small apartment that wasn't fancy enough for the snotty parents. (i might add that i dropped off said child at her completely ordinary and not at all fancy-looking house yesterday and i wasn't impressed, nor could i see how an apartment, which is all of a block away from their house, was really that inferior.) i hope the child didn't report on our ramshackle, falling down farmhouse to her parents, or she'll never be allowed to come over here again. actually, that's not true, i hope she did report to them, as i'd love a little confrontation on this issue. pretentious gits.

and then there was another tale of a set of snotty parents who bought their child an iPhone 5 in an overtly-stated attempt to make her more popular. happily, it didn't seem to make any difference.

these are nice girls of the pæne pige sort - well, groomed, dressed in a normal, but not over-the-top or designer way. they go to riding and they have long, blunt-cut blonde hair. they appear to be nice girls.

both of these girls ride at the stable where we keep matilde now and at the lesson wednesday, i thought they were riding their own horses. turns out they weren't. neither of them has a horse and they were riding the lesson horses. so much for the pretentions of parents.

what are such parents teaching their children? elitism? snobbishness? in a small, podunk town full of ordinary middle class people? laughable. but i guess you can never underestimate how much people need their albanian. but if their children can't rest in who they are and feel secure, all the iPhone 5s in the world aren't going to help.

6 comments:

When I see things like this I always begin to wonder why people get so wrapped up in competing with the Joneses. There's global warming, starvation, watching the sun rise, watching the sun set, eating fresh foods, little kittens and fluffy bunnies, flowers, snow, space, creativity.......and of all the things in the world they choose competition.

We get that over here, too. People seem to be so wrapped up in their own insecurities - how they look to others, how they perfect or elevate perceptions of them, how they cut ethical corners to elevate their kids... it all seems to be so short-term to me. So superficial. I talk to my daughter all the time about people who will only shop at Noa Noa for their kids, or drive a car with an "acceptable" giant logo on it, or buy their kids an iPhone when the kid is 7, and she gets it, thankfully. I like our family's imperfections. They give us character and depth, and I think that level of "what will people think of us" gives you nothing but debt up to your eyeballs, and bleeding ulcers. :)

What worries me about those kinds of parents is what they may or may not pass on to their children of bad self esteem.If these parents set some kind of standard for which everyone should live up to, and these children grow up to make different choices, what kind of message does that then send, about their parents feelings towards them.Or will the alternate choices then become the new standard?I do not know. I just know that it is not the way I want to raise my children.